Reach
Reach refers to the total number of unique individuals or target audience members exposed to a marketing message or campaign. It measures the size of the audience reached. The larger the reach, the more people are exposed to the campaign, increasing the potential for awareness, engagement, and conversions.

Importance of Reach:

Brand Awareness
Reach helps in building brand awareness by ensuring that a significant number of people become familiar with a brand, product, or service. It lays the foundation for brand recognition and recall.

Audience Expansion
By expanding reach, marketers can tap into new markets, target new customer segments, or reach potential customers who were previously unaware of the brand or its offerings.

Market Penetration
Reach is crucial for penetrating the market and gaining a competitive edge. By reaching a wide audience, marketers can increase market share and capture the attention of potential customers who may be considering alternatives.

Frequency
Frequency refers to the total number of times that your message has been delivered to your target audience within a timeframe.  This is especially important when adopting an omni-channel marketing approach since the messaging and audience must remain consistent across platforms to guarantee an effective campaign.  In short, frequency measures the repetition or frequency of exposure.

Importance of Frequency:

Message Reinforcement
Frequency helps reinforce the marketing message in the minds of the target audience. It ensures that the message is not easily forgotten and increases the chances of message retention and recall.

Perception Building
With increased frequency, marketers can shape the perception of the brand or product in the minds of consumers. Repeated exposure helps establish trust, credibility, and a sense of familiarity, making the brand more memorable and likely to be considered when making purchasing decisions.

Conversion and Action
Higher frequency can lead to improved conversion rates. It increases the likelihood of consumers taking the desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or engaging with the brand.

Both reach and frequency work together to maximize the impact of marketing campaigns. A high reach ensures that the campaign message reaches a broad audience, while frequency ensures that the message is reinforced and remembered over time. Striking the right balance between reach and frequency is essential to optimize campaign performance and achieve marketing objectives.

Wrapping Up…
It’s worth noting that the importance of reach and frequency may vary depending on the campaign goals, target audience, industry, and marketing channels used. A thorough understanding of the target audience and careful campaign planning can help determine the appropriate reach and frequency levels for optimal results. If you’re unhappy with your current marketing results, or you’re about to embark on a new omni-channel campaign, drop us a line for a quick call.

Cost Savings

Online marketing offers significant cost savings compared to traditional marketing methods. Print, radio, and television advertisements often come with high price tags, making them less accessible for businesses with limited budgets. In contrast, online marketing provides cost-effective alternatives that can reach a wide audience at a fraction of the cost.

Social media platforms, for example, offer affordable advertising options, allowing businesses to target specific demographics and track campaign performance in real time. Additionally, email marketing enables personalized and targeted communication with customers, eliminating the expenses associated with printing and postage.

By embracing online marketing, businesses can allocate their resources more efficiently, maximize their return on investment, and compete with larger companies on a level playing field.

Increased Reach

Online marketing provides businesses with the opportunity significantly to expand their reach and tap into a global audience. Unlike traditional marketing methods, which are often limited by geographic boundaries, online marketing allows businesses to connect with potential customers worldwide. Digital channels such as search engines, social media platforms, and websites can promote a business’s products or services to a diverse and vast audience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can help businesses improve their visibility in search engine results, making it easier for potential customers to discover their offerings. Social media advertising enables businesses to target specific demographics and interests, reaching individuals most likely to be interested in their products or services. Additionally, content marketing through blog posts, videos, or podcasts allows businesses to establish themselves as industry experts and attract a wider and more interested audience.

By leveraging the power of online marketing, businesses can enhance brand awareness, capture the attention of new customers, and generate valuable leads. The ability to reach a broader audience not only increases the chances of conversions and sales but also lays the foundation for sustained business growth.

Customer Engagement

Online marketing revolutionizes customer engagement by providing businesses with powerful tools to connect and interact with their target audience in a more personalized and meaningful way. Through online platforms, businesses can establish real-time communication channels that enable them to understand customer needs, address inquiries promptly, and offer tailored solutions.

Social media platforms serve as valuable channels for businesses to engage with their customers. By actively participating in discussions, responding to comments, and sharing relevant content, businesses can foster a sense of community and build stronger relationships with their audience.

Email marketing campaigns allow businesses to send targeted messages, special offers, or personalized recommendations directly to their customers’ inboxes, ensuring a more personalized and engaging experience.

Online marketing opens the door to interactive content formats, such as quizzes, polls, and surveys, that actively involve customers and encourage their participation. By leveraging these interactive elements, businesses can gather valuable feedback, gain insights into customer preferences, and adapt their strategies to cater more effectively to their audience’s needs.

By embracing online marketing and prioritizing customer engagement, businesses can nurture trust, foster brand loyalty, and ultimately drive increased sales and business growth. The ability to establish genuine connections and provide personalized experiences distinguishes online marketing as a powerful tool for businesses to thrive in the digital landscape.

Strategies

Online marketing offers a plethora of effective strategies that businesses can leverage to maximize their growth and achieve their goals. Social media is a powerful tool, allowing businesses to tap into vast audiences and establish direct interactive connections. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter enable businesses to share compelling content, engage with followers, and foster brand loyalty through consistent and meaningful interactions. Social media advertising also provides precise targeting options, allowing businesses to reach specific demographics and tailor their message to resonate with their target audience.

SEO plays a crucial role in enhancing online visibility and attracting potential customers. By optimizing website content, structure, and meta tags, businesses can improve their organic search rankings and ensure that their offerings are discoverable by interested individuals. Implementing keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlink-building strategies are essential elements of a robust SEO approach that can drive targeted traffic and increase conversions.

As well as organic strategies, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers a targeted and cost-effective way to reach specific audiences. Platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads enable businesses to create highly tailored campaigns, choosing keywords, demographics and even geographic locations to display their ads. With PPC, businesses pay only when users click on their ads, making it a measurable and results-driven marketing strategy.

By leveraging a diverse range of online marketing strategies, businesses can build a comprehensive and effective approach to reach, engage and convert their target audience, driving significant growth and success in the digital market.

Getting Started

Embarking on online marketing may seem overwhelming, but with a strategic approach, businesses can successfully navigate this digital landscape and unlock its tremendous potential. To get started, businesses must identify their target audience and the online channels they frequent. Conducting market research, analyzing customer demographics, and understanding their preferences and behavior will provide valuable insights to shape an effective online marketing strategy.

Once the target audience is defined, businesses can create a compelling content strategy that resonates with their intended customers. This entails crafting engaging and informative content, such as blog posts, social media updates, videos, and/or podcasts, that aligns with the interests and needs of the target audience. By consistently delivering valuable and relevant content, businesses can establish themselves as industry authorities and build trust with their audience.

Tracking progress and measuring the success of online marketing efforts is crucial for optimizing campaigns and achieving desired outcomes. Utilizing analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, businesses can monitor website traffic, user engagement, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators. This data-driven approach enables businesses to refine their strategies, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions to maximize the impact of their online marketing initiatives.

By following these steps and continuously refining their approach based on data and feedback, businesses can feel confident that they will harness the power of online marketing to drive significant business growth and success.

Content

Content is a critical component of online marketing. Creating high-quality, compelling content is a fundamental aspect of capturing the attention and interest of a target audience. Businesses should strive to produce content that not only informs and educates but also entertains and resonates with their customers and potential customers.

To achieve this, businesses can employ various content marketing strategies. Blogging, for example, provides an avenue to share valuable insights and industry expertise and demonstrate thought leadership. By crafting informative and engaging blog posts, businesses can establish themselves as trusted authorities in their field and attract a loyal following.

Another effective content marketing strategy is creating visually appealing and shareable content, such as infographics, videos, and/or interactive content. These formats not only grab attention but also facilitate easy consumption and social sharing, expanding the reach of the content and increasing brand exposure.

Businesses should constantly monitor the performance of their content and adjust their approach accordingly. Analyzing metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversions can provide valuable insights into what type of content resonates best with your target audience. By leveraging these insights, your business can refine its content strategy and deliver more impactful and relevant content to maximize your online marketing efforts.

By prioritizing the creation of quality content, utilizing a variety of content formats, and leveraging data-driven insights to fine-tune their approach, your business can effectively engage your target audience, foster brand loyalty, and ultimately maximize business growth through effective online marketing.

Online marketing is a powerful tool for business growth in the digital age. It offers cost savings, increased reach, and enhanced customer engagement. By leveraging digital channels such as websites, search engines, social media platforms, and email marketing, businesses can expand their global reach and establish meaningful connections with their target audience. Implementing strategies like social media marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising enables businesses effectively to reach, engage and convert their audience. To get started, businesses should identify their target audience, create compelling content, and track progress using analytics tools.

Take the leap into online marketing today and unlock its tremendous potential for your business. Embrace the digital landscape, engage your target audience, and maximize your business growth through effective online marketing strategies.

However, this advertising method does not come without pitfalls. One of the biggest is click fraud. Research from the University of Baltimore concluded that click fraud costs digital marketers as much as $35 billion [1] in lost ad dollars per year. Here’s what you need to know to defend your ad budget.

What Is Click Fraud?

You’ve likely heard of fake traffic before, but if not, this usually refers to traffic generated by bots. In some cases, these bots are utilized to crash competitor websites, but on Facebook, they are used exclusively to cut you out of the advertising market.

These bots, or even sometimes click farms of low-cost human workers, spam-click on ads to drive up your costs and run you out of business. Many small-business owners are left scratching their heads as to why their advertising is not converting into sales, and consequently abandon the advertising channel.

These shady business practices crush smaller competitors, allowing larger companies with heftier wallets to control all of the advertising space. However, all is not lost, and there are ways for small businesses to fight back.

How Can Small Businesses Combat Click Fraud

While it’s impossible to eliminate all click fraud, there are a few things you can do to make sure your ads are getting to real consumers. Here are a few strategies to implement:

Optimize for Conversions and Not for Clicks

While using software that automatically optimizes your ads for the best converting audience is very useful, it’s not perfect. This is because software is only as smart as the human that trains it. If you tell the software that you want to maximize clicks on your ad, then that’s exactly what it will do. Unfortunately, it can also hone in on fraud clicks and create a profile that targets the very traffic that you are looking to avoid.

You can alter this behavior and greatly improve your campaign’s performance by optimizing your ad campaigns for conversions instead of clicks. This means that instead of the end goal being getting someone to interact with your ad, an action that invites bots to take a bite out of your budget, you will instead be optimizing for those who make a purchase or perform another desired action such as an email sign-up.

This takes a bit more time to set up, obviously, but it’s well worth doing. Not only will this action help to eliminate click fraud from your campaigns, but it will also help you to see how profitable your ad campaigns actually are.

Use a Landing Page

In addition to optimizing for conversions and not for clicks, using a proper landing page can also reduce click fraud. This is because bots are often programmed with very simple objectives in mind. They know how to click on the ad, and that’s about it. They are not sophisticated enough, in most circumstances, to complete further actions like a human would, and even if your competitor is utilizing a human click farm, they likely won’t bother.

So, while you will still have to pay for any initial bot clicks, the software will begin showing your ad to the kinds of people who will interact with the landing page and not just click the ad. This landing page will also be useful in separating traffic you acquire through sources other than your paid traffic, such as organically or through social media. Using this information, you can make better judgments concerning your ad campaigns.

Be Wary Of Facebook’s Audience Network

The audience network is intended to push your ads to a larger number of people. While this sounds like a great idea at first, the system does not always push your ads to the right people. In fact, it often pushes them out to big pages, which are frequently populated by bots.

In most cases, having tighter targeting not only reduces bot traffic but also ends up being a lot cheaper for you. Laser-targeted ads get better conversion rates, and this reduces your cost per click on the Facebook ads platform significantly.

Target Multiple Interest Sources

It’s a popular and very effective strategy to target the audience of similar brands who are already successfully advertising on Facebook. Unfortunately, bots have taken up residence here as well, even on legitimate pages.

You can, however, help yourself to avoid becoming a victim by utilizing multi-interest targeting. This means you’ll be dialing in a very specific audience who matches several different qualifying criteria rather than just one.

For example, if you were advertising a new music festival, you might target the fans of other similar events. However, you might also cross-target fans of artists, both big and small, who have played at those shows and further qualify leads by the location of your festival. It’s far less likely that bots or click farms will meet all of these criteria, so you can get a higher quality advertising audience.

One of the great things about Facebook  is that they really allow you to narrow down your search parameters to just the right people, thanks to interest targeting. Make sure that you’re taking advantage of all the options that are available to you.

Make Liberally Use of the Block List

Did you know that in your Facebook ads account, you can block specific people, demographics, and countries from clicking on your ad? This one is a definite no-brainer if you only sell products in one country. Blocking traffic that can’t convert is easy and reduces fraud substantially.

However, even if you have a global business, you may still wish to block demographics or countries that just aren’t converting for you. For example, maybe your product is too expensive for them, or perhaps it just doesn’t resonate in that locale.

Whatever the case, there’s no reason to waste ad spending on this traffic whether they are bots or not. If you have any locations with a large number of clicks and no conversions, consider adding them to the block list to conserve your precious ad dollars.

However, just blocking countries like India or Pakistan will not eliminate click fraud altogether. Many bots are actually run in the United States by competitors themselves, or they are using user-agent spoofing, a process which masks the user’s true location. This means that rather than editing your ad campaigns using broad brush strokes, you’ll instead need to dig a bit deeper and learn how to cut where it really counts. 

Make Use of Custom Audiences

Do you already have a solid customer base on Facebook? If so, you can have Facebook specifically target more people like your existing customers. Facebook is great at using data, and this can be a fantastic way to attract more of your kind of people.

When combined with the other tips above, this method can be used quite effectively to expand your audience, and having the Facebook pixel installed on your website pulls double duty for you, as it allows you to retarget existing customers for future sales.

While retargeting won’t get you new customers directly, nurturing an existing customer and alerting them to new product offerings can be more profitable. In fact, an existing customer is 50% more likely to try a new product from you than a new customer is. [2] Retargeting is also a great way to make sure your ad dollars are contributing to your sales goals and not click farms because these ads target people who have already converted before.

Wrapping Up…

In conclusion, reducing click fraud is really about making yourself more involved in the advertising process. While being able to set it and forget it would be fantastic, a successful ad campaign needs proper management and fine-tuning to remain profitable. 

      [1] ubalt.edu/news/news-releases.cfm?id=3621

      [2] crazyegg.com/blog/customer-retention/

We live in an age where information is king, and marketing data is one of your most powerful tools to increase conversion rates and ROI. Over the years, the available data for marketing campaigns has grown exponentially. In virtually every media channel, we have the ability to target prospects with a dizzying myriad of selection criteria. We can now focus in on prospects like never before to make certain that we are reaching our targeted prospects across multiple channels. One of the more recent additions to the marketing dataset is geolocation data.

Geolocation uses the GPS built in to mobile devices, to accurately determine where the device, and the user of the device, are located. This data is accessed through various “apps” that the user has installed, and grants permission to use their location data. This data is made available to data scientists and marketers to provide actionable insights for brands and companies alike helping them better understand the prospect’s complete path to purchase.

Geo location marketing, also known as location based marketing has been around for over a decade and has proven to be an effective component of any marketing plan. Geo Location Marketing is designed to reach out to the “right audience” at the “right time” with the “right offers”.  The newest form of Geo Location Marketing is known as Geo Conquesting. Geo Conquesting specifically targets consumers visiting your competitors in an attempt to lure them away. The ideas is – the prospect is visiting a competitor to purchase a product or service that you have. By promoting your product to the consumer, you are not only increasing brand awareness, but also compelling a purchase.

A marketing partner can help you develop strong geo marketing strategies with objective information about campaign success. These analytics help you to become better equipped to penetrate your local market.

Geo-Fencing

A geofence is a way to engage consumers with offers while they are in a particular area. This type of geo location marketing is one of the first strategies to emerge and is common in most mobile marketing campaigns. The geofences are setup around points of interest and “push” notifications and ads to the prospect’s device while they are in the area.

For example, a store could create a simple geofence in an area surrounding its physical location. When users pass through, receiving a location-triggered alert or deal makes them considerably more likely to stop in and shop. This type of marketing relies on the prospect’s engagement while they are in the area.

The greatest limitation of geofence campaigns is that they can only attempt to convert while the user is in that area.

Using Smart Boundaries

Creating smart boundaries around Points Of Interest allows you to market to consumers frequenting those locations after they have left the location. They can also be used to identify patterns over time, so brands can send out marketing materials with the greatest likelihood of conversion.

These smart boundaries create a structure around the movement data to develop the most effective targeting by monitoring Points Of Interest and keeping visit counts. The smart boundaries focus your marketing efforts to a very precise audience based on their behavior allowing you to go beyond mere city or zip code data to target nearby households and instead focus campaigns on the prospect’s behavior.

Prospect Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your competitor’s location allows you to target potential prospects that are currently in the buying cycle. These boundaries can also be created around locations that your customers would frequent to build a branding or awareness campaign and begin to target farther up the sales funnel. For example, if you were a new car dealer, you could not only create prospect boundaries around your competitors, but also include a separate campaign that monitored service centers near your location to promote your service and parts department.

Conversion Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your location(s) provides insight on the performance of your overall marketing efforts and can serve as a suppression audience to conserve marketing dollars. The conversion boundary also creates a new segment in your audience to present a new offer to people who have recently visited your location and make them aware of upcoming events and even loyalty programs to keep them coming back.

Implementing Multi Channel Geo Location Marketing

Knowing the precise location and habits of your prospects is powerful information. You can use this data in order to create effective marketing campaigns that have substantial impact. Using multiple channels, from social media to search engines and display networks, you can reach these pre-defined audiences with a reach and frequency that optimizes spend and increases conversions.

Multi-channel marketing includes online and offline campaigns that include the timely display of ads and posts for your customers already checking their social news feeds, listening to radio, and browsing the Internet. This is in addition to direct mail and email campaigns keeps you in front of your targeted audience to create a “recall” effect that increases organic customer acquisition by staying in front of our targeted audience.

Evolution of Marketing

In the past several years, big data has made a huge impact on the marketing landscape. Marketers are now able to speak directly to customers more effectively than ever before. They have been able to gain extraordinary insight into their interests, habits and shopping behavior from their online activities.

Geo location marketing is the latest evolution of this phenomenon. It uses information already accessible through each user’s mobile device and creates an added dimension to existing marketing data. For brick-and-mortar retailers, it’s an innovative way to get shoppers back in stores and ready to buy.

Now, with partners in the geo location marketing space, this technology is available for use by everyday retailers. In conjunction with established — and essential — online marketing techniques like local search and SEO, and SEM, this is an emerging and powerful way to drive your next marketing push.

For Your Geo Location Marketing

For retailers, marketers, and agencies unaccustomed to the use of this type of prospect data, this latest marketing tool may seem out of reach, but you do not have to develop these campaigns on your own. Partners such as PrimaryLens can help you make sense of the emerging opportunities that geolocation marketing offers.

Data partners like PrimaryLens not only deliver marketing campaigns, but a monthly overview of past initiatives, and you get to keep the data you have commissioned, in order to see what worked and what didn’t. In order to assess your campaign success, you can review this information and revise it as necessary going forward.

PrimaryLens offers essential, powerful tools for modern business. In order to get a feel for how the system works, get in touch with us. We’ll schedule a call for you to discuss how to leverage the power of geolocation marketing as a component of your next marketing campaign.

It’s clear that local search is powerful when it comes to reaching customers, but many businesses fail to take advantage of it. To help out, we’re sharing three expert tips for improving your local SEO on mobile.

Follow this advice, and you’ll soon see an increase in your local leads.

1. Create a Google My Business Page

Creating a Google My Business page is one of the quickest, easiest and most effective ways to boost your local mobile SEO.

You’ll fill in some basic details about your business, including name, address, services and website, and these details will be displayed prominently any time a customer searches for a business like yours on mobile.

Your business will be shown on a local map, and customers will be given the option to get directions, contact you or see more information — without ever having to leave Google. This puts your business right in front of customers at the exact moment they need you.

2. Design Ads That Sound Local

Are you currently taking advantage of paid search ads?

That’s a smart move — but you need to ensure that your ads are location-specific. If they’re not, searchers might assume that you’re a national company, and you could lose customers to other local businesses.

Show that you’re the real deal by referencing local places, using local slang and making references to local events. For example, if you own a clothes shop close to a big festival location, you could create an ad with text like, “Get your last-minute festival look.” Or if you’re close to a beach, you could say something like, “Visiting X beach this weekend? Shop discount swimsuits here first.”

3. Target the Right Search Terms

Are you optimizing your website for search terms that make sense when typed but sound strange out loud? If you want to optimize for mobile, that’s a bad move. Voice searches are growing all the time, and Google reports that 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches.

That means you need to target terms that make sense when spoken. So, instead of a keyword like, “local plumber Texas,” you might optimize for a phrase like, “Where’s the nearest plumber in Texas?”

Writing website content in a natural, conversational tone makes it easy to incorporate this kind of term and also helps you to move away from old-fashioned keyword-stuffing tactics.

Optimizing for local search is a great way to drive leads and connect with local customers. Get started by creating a Google My Business page, designing location-specific ads and targeting keywords that work during voice searches.

Wrapping Up

These are simply starting points to improve your local online presence. If you’ve been nodding your head as you read these, congratulations! Take a few moments to revisit each of these items and make sure that they are up to date and performing at the level you’d expect. That means, updating or adding to the photos on your Google business page, review your search and display ads to make sure that you’re incorporating seasonal changes and events. This is also an excellent time to compare the performance of your existing ads to determine what’s working best and create variations of that creative.

Marketing is never a set it and forget it exercise, and re-examining your processes and efforts needs to become part of your regular routine to find areas for improvement. This is just one area to review, and any successful marketer should have a weekly schedule of marketing initiatives to review for both cost per lead, and more importantly, cost per sale or acquisition.

TVision software, which is a combination of Xbox Kinect and its own #technology, reports more specific numbers to its clients so they can better target #advertising and create content that keeps viewers more attentive.

This is another example of what we discussed earlier this year when I brought you the “Television Retargeting“, but it is the first time that we are seeing the technology piggy back on 3rd party hardware such as Microsoft’s Xbox. Going forward expect to see the number of articles regarding the retargeting of consumers from digital to television and from television to #online advertising continue to increase, especially with the recent announcement of mobile advertising’s growth by 2018.

If you’d like to read the entire article regarding TVision Insights, you can see it here.

These figures place mobile at nearly 90% of all NEW advertising money in the global market. This accelerated growth places mobile advertising as the second largest advertising media format behind television, which is expected to generate $206 billion in revenue in 2015. This meteoric rise in digital advertising spend is also helped by a diminishing global growth for TV in developed markets. In fact, according to Vincent Letang from Magna Global, television growth in some developed markets is actually stagnate.

The prospect that digital advertising would capture more dollars than television has become an inevitably in recent years as the number of mobile devices currently used by consumers continues to increase at a mind blowing rate and advertisers slowly shifted their dollars from their print budgets to their digital ad purchases. The prediction by ZenithOptimedia is reinforced by recent data collected from Counselor’s State of the Industry study which found that over 54% of all businesses currently have a “mobile friendly” version of their site indicating that the the global economy as a whole has already created a significant platform for the proliferation of these new online ads. An important fact to consider with this trend is that the bulk of the format for these new digital ads are skewed toward online video, such as pre-rolls and social media platforms rather than conventional search and display ads. Savvy marketers will have their work cut out for them as they decide where and how this massive increase in digital ad budgets should be spent.

Odds are your home is one of the 90 million homes that has at least one DVR or set top box in a living room or bedroom recording your favorite shows, which is incredibly convenient.  What you may not have realized is that some of these same boxes also allow the cable and satellite providers to record what shows air on the TVs in your home as well.  Marketers can then combine that information with other publicly available demographic data and segment their target audiences with laser like precision.  Companies like Simulmedia aggregate the set top box data from millions of Americans to help companies target consumers watching “long tail” cable inventory, or shows that are generally cheaper than prime time hits but have an almost cult like following.  For example, a 30 second spot on a “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America” might go for around $43,000, compare that to a “long tail” like “Big Cat Diaries” which also runs mornings for around $650.  The difference is not just the price point, it’s the information about the viewer.  The “Good Morning America” buy offers mass reach, but the “Big Cat Diaries” buy has precision.  In short,  you end up paying less and you know the right person is watching.  It’s king of like choosing between a shotgun or a rifle.

Up until now, the television industry has been in the stone age when it comes to ad-targeting compared to online services.  We can place online ads and segment customers not just based on age, and gender.  We can identify age, gender, geographic location, shopping habits, websites visited, social media habits, and the list goes on.  That kind of precision is one of the reasons that digital ad spends are expected to reach $82 billion by 21018 according to eMarketer.

Companies like Simulmedia began springing up a few years ago as set top box makers began licensing out their data and the result so far has taken place in the background where an advertiser has swapped out the Cheez-It  commercial for Special K.  However, now that Pandora’s box has been opened on your television sets, the next generation of set top boxes may very well begin allowing advertisers to show specific commercials by individual box in the house.  Combine that with the recent announcement of Verizon’s “supercookie” tracking program in January of this past year and it’s not hard to imagine that Zappos display ad following you from your computer to your phone to your tv.

Instead, we would likely target all households with an income between $100,000 and $250,000 within 30 miles of the store with an emphasis on registered owners driving our brand.  An even better solution would be to analyse our previous sales to pinpoint the top producing zip codes and determine how far out from the store we needed to travel to reach 80% of our previous sales.  Next, we could suppress our existing customers from the list to ensure conquest sales and tailor a message to that audience.  Meanwhile, a parallel campaign could be run to identify opportunities from within the store’s customer database who had purchased more than 24 months ago and may be re-entering the market.  Although the general campaign to both segments would be some form of “Buy Now”, the delivery of this message should be drastically different given the context of each relationship.

Next week we’ll discuss Reach vs Frequency – The inverse curves